As I rounded the building, I noticed that another car had pulled to a stop and, inside, a lone man looked in my direction. I wouldn’t have bothered to look at him, except I had to pass right by his window to get to my pickup.
“Hey, son,” he said.
“Hey, mister,” I said in return, as I passed by, barely glancing at him.
“Hold up,” he said, and I stopped.
“Sorry, you need something?” I asked, looking at him fully for the first time. He was probably Daddy’s age, though he looked a lot thinner, and whiter, behind his thick glasses. He had thin hair, and his forehead glistened with a sheen of oil.
“You traveling alone?” he asked, kind of smiling, though it made him look sheepish.
I didn’t know what to say to that odd question. “Been traveling for most of two days,” I said. “Yeah, I’m alone. Why?”
“I am, too,” he said. “Alone, I mean.”
I began to move off, feeling kind of strange. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.
“Wait! C’mon,” he said. “Why don’t you get in and talk to me for a little while?”
A light went on in my head, as fuzzy headed and tired as I was, and I gave the old man a big smile. “Sorry, mister.”
“You won’t have to do anything. You can just…sit here.” Disappointment was evident in his face, and I felt sorry for him.
“No thanks. All right?”
He just nodded, then looked me up and down, and I moved away, feeling his eyes on me.
A moment later, I was back in the pickup and started the engine, then hit the road again. I really did feel sorry for the old man, and frightened at the thought that I’d ever end up like that. And again, I thought of Lance and tried to tell myself that the two years would pass, and we’d be back together.
But somehow, as I drove on into the rest of that day, breezing through Phoenix and catching Interstate 10, it was hard to believe we would.
Seventeen
I Have to Stop Here
There’s a lot more to Will Barnett’s journals. But I have decided to stop here. As I’ve read and transcribed them, I’ve seen the slightest shift in the way Will wrote. Sometimes feverishly, risking legibility, sometimes haltingly, as if one thought interrupted one he was setting down. There is a break, however, in the journals, just as there was in the first set I did about his Uncle Sean, when his uncle went away.
So there is a break here, from the time he left Lance Surfett in San Francisco and began his trip back to Hachita without him. I can only surmise that Will was too busy and probably too upset to continue for awhile.
I remember him telling me when we met in November of 2001 at the restaurant in Lordsburg where he gave me these journals that, sometimes, writing in them was the only thing that kept him sane.
I also know that moving from something familiar to a new place can throw a person off, so that it takes time to return to what has been a habit. In Will’s case, he appears to have dropped his almost daily habit of writing.
But as I promised Will, I will make a promise here to continue transcribing his journals. Whether there is enough in the boxes to make three or four distinct books is difficult to say. I’ve rejected some of his material because it’s illegible, or because it’s just notes that I can’t readily tie into his story. So, how many books there will eventually be depends largely on the way the material settles out in my mind as I read through them.
—Ronald L. Donaghe, Las Cruces, New Mexico, March 2002
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Lance Page 18